RLP 148: 19th Century Germans in St. Louis with Heidi Mathis

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 148 19th century Germans in St. Louis with Heidi Mathis. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcasts about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana elder accredited genealogy professional, Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team Familylocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast joined Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go, Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (50s):
Well, hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
Great. We were reading a really fun article yesterday that I am still thinking about for our study group with the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

Diana (1m 1s):
Yeah, that was a great article. It was my turn to pick, and I chose one by Barbara Vines Little, who is probably one of the leading experts on Virginia research. And I took an Institute class from her at SLIG about a year and a half ago, you know, right before COVID hit. And it was just fabulous. I learned so much about Virginia, so I really wanted to read an article she’d written. And this article was written in 2000. I learned so much about researching in Virginia, just from the article.

Nicole (1m 33s):
Yeah, it was called Teasing the Silent Woman from the Shadows of History: Mary Fitzhugh (Stuart) Fitzhugh of Virginia. And it was interesting reading one from so long ago. I mean, this was written 21 years ago. And so it’s just interesting to think about, you know, maybe how the editors did things differently. And also more sources are available. We noticed she had used a transcription of a newspaper article found in a book, whereas now it would probably be easier to find the original.

Diana (2m 7s):
Right. And I think it’s a good perspective to think about how many resources she used considering that timeframe, where this was research all done at repositories and in books you solve many published sources, fascinating accounts and manuscript, collections, diaries of all of these kin folk of the research subject of this woman. And it brought her to life. You know, she starts at the beginning saying that often our females are mentioned in very few records and, you know, I think there were about five records she was mentioned in, but then Barbara brought in those whole wealth of information from all these other sources that were clustered around herself.

Diana (2m 49s):
It gave us a lot of ideas for a research scientist in Virginia, but for all of our ancestors where we feel like we just don’t have much about them.

Nicole (2m 57s):
Yes. This was more of like a biography then a case study that you often see in the NGSQ. So it was interesting to see a different style of writing more of a narrative family history style, where you learn about the historical context more about that than proving the answer to a research question.

Diana (3m 17s):
And that brings us to our topic of the day, which is Mid 19th Century Germans in St. Louis. And we have got a guest with us today. We’ve got Heidi here. Hi Heidi.

Heidi Matthis (3m 29s):
Hello.

Diana (3m 30s):
Heidi has been working with us at Family Locket and she has done some blog posts for us on researching in Missouri. And she happens to have German ancestors that came and settled in St. Louis. And so by researching her family and all of the backstory and the history, she discovered so much about the time that she was able to write a wonderful blog post. And so we’re going to talk all about these mid 19th century Germans. So Heidi, just tell us a little bit about why were these Germans coming into the area mid 1840s or so

Heidi Matthis (4m 10s):
Germans were coming in this period for reasons that they had always come: wars and food shortages and an overpopulation in Germany were factors that always caused people to immigrate. But in the 1800s, there were two further reasons that just led to this huge wave. One was the Enlightenment had given people more ideas about individual rights and freedoms, and that had led to the American and French revolutions. And then also in 1848 and 1849, there was an attempted German revolution where you had a lot of young people pushing for worker and voter rights. And when this revolution failed many disillusioned, young people immigrated to America where they believe that they would get these freedoms.

Heidi Matthis (4m 57s):
And the second reason that caused this big wave was the industrial revolution. It had caused a lot of upheaval. It was causing a shift from a nearly entirely farm economy in Germany to more industrial jobs. And that had led to a shift of people moving from almost all rural to an increasingly urbanized population. And this, all of these factors just led to a lot of disruption. Lastly, in this period they had steamships. It was just a lot easier to get to the United States. It was the industrial revolution, they could get on a railroad and get to the coast of Bremen or Hamburg and get on a steamship and just be right over in the United States in weeks and not months.

Heidi Matthis (5m 39s):
And many, a Germans in this period came to the port of New Orleans and went straight up the Mississippi to St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Chicago, all these cities on the Mississippi River system. And all these cities would get a lot of Germans in this period. And they were coming through the port of new Orleans because they really wanted land. And the homestead act of 1862 meant that they had that promise of land. And so coming through the Port of New Orleans, they’d be a lot closer to that land from the homestead act. You know,

Diana (6m 16s):
I think it’s so interesting. So often when we think of our immigrants, I think of them just coming straight across the Atlantic and going into the ports of Boston or Philadelphia, you know, just on the Eastern seaboard, we need to sometimes adjust our thinking to New Orleans and Mississippi and that whole area. So I’m glad you mentioned that because we do see that at this period of time, a lot of immigrants, not only from Germany, but also Ireland. And we’ll talk a little bit about similarities with the Irish this time period also was just prior to the Civil War. And so we’ve got this whole problem with north and south slave states, non slave states.

Diana (6m 59s):
And so these German immigrants were coming into kind of a hotbed weren’t they

Heidi Matthis (7m 4s):
Absolutely. Missouri at this time was really finely balanced between pro-Southern and pro-Northern factions. And into this mix, you had this like huge wave of Germans and Irish that, the Germans in particular, really pushed Mis, kind of tipped Missouri to the Northern side. And this was just a very upsetting and difficult time for everybody.

Diana (7m 29s):
So you have a German ancestor. Tell us a little bit about him and where he came from, where he ended up.

Heidi Matthis (7m 37s):
Well, the one that I talked about for this blog post was called Burkhard Schlag and he’s my third great-grandfather and he was from Hesse and he had immigrated like a lot of Germans had to St. Louis in 1854. So he was just right in this wave of people. In fact, just to let you know, like what was going on in St. Louis and how it looked to the native born Missourians. In 1833, there were only 18 German families in St. Louis, but four years later, only four years later, there were 6,000 Germans. And then by the 1850s, there were 22 over 22,000 Germans in a city of 78,000.

Heidi Matthis (8m 21s):
At that time, 43% of St. Louis were either German or Irish. And then later in the 1880s, 46% of school children were Germans. And so you can just see how this immigration pattern just radically changed the city in this time period.

Nicole (8m 39s):
Wow, that’s really interesting. I didn’t realize that there was such a change at that time. What type of situation were the typical German immigrants in where they lower-class middle-class? What was that?

Heidi Matthis (8m 51s):
That’s a really interesting question. Basically, the Germans who in this period tended to be more middle-class and they tended to bring their whole family. And this is because impoverished Germans mostly did not immigrate at this time, the Irish, because the famine was so severe, they really didn’t have any choice. They, they found a way to come to the United States no matter what. And they did tend to be more impoverished when they got here.

Nicole (9m 18s):
That’s a really interesting difference between the two groups.

Heidi Matthis (9m 22s):
Yeah, this period was really just dominated by the Germans and the Irish, and it caused a backlash in the United States that was known as Nativism. And we’re currently having that in our own politics right now, but that it’s not a new thing at all this Nativism, which was just a backlash, people not wanting all these foreigners pouring in caused the formation of this political party called the Know-Nothings. And it even resulted in riots in, in St. Louis and in Cincinnati, people think that part of this backlash was because many of the Germans and almost all of the Irish were Catholic. And this was kind of the first time the United States had had this many Catholics coming into the United States at once.

Heidi Matthis (10m 4s):
And it definitely was a way to, you know, that coalesced everyone’s fears. And then in St. Louis in particular people fear Germans, because they, they really did come in with some antislavery views, this particular set of Germans.

Nicole (10m 20s):
Absolutely. I can see how that would be worrying for all the southerners who had been pouring into Missouri in order to make it a slave state. That’s very tricky for those Germans coming in. I wonder how that felt to be kind of hated since they got there because of their views against slavery.

Heidi Matthis (10m 37s):
And also just because of their foreignness and they didn’t speak English. I mean, I think there’s just a human reaction to like, you know, all these foreigners who don’t speak English pouring into your, into your state, you can see it’s a natural reaction, and yet it doesn’t always excuse the way people react.

Diana (10m 56s):
I really enjoy learning about history and seeing how humans have always had the same problems.

Heidi Matthis (11m 1s):
Absolutely.

Diana (11m 2s):
We’ve got another group of Germans that came in that were kind of unique and they were called the 48ers. And these are not the ones that were going out to pan for gold in California. Those were the 49ers, but these are the 48ers. So who is this group?

Heidi Matthis (11m 19s):
They were a really important group that came in this period. And as I said earlier, there had been this failed German revolution in 1848, in 1849, where you had all these young people, some of those Enlightenment ideas have kind of trickled down to them and they really wanted to have more power in their life and have voting rights and, and have more power at their jobs and stuff because of all the industrialization they wanted not to be treated so badly. So they had this uprising in Germany and it failed. So these Germans were, you know, really attracted to the United States by our Declaration of Independence and all of our Bill of Rights and came here hoping to have rights for themselves, but the ones who landed in St.

Heidi Matthis (12m 7s):
Louis, where there was slavery all around them, there were slave auctions in St. Louis. They started to realize that if black Americans could be denied their rights, that maybe immigrants could be denied their rights. And so this really galvanized them and, you know, they had started off being very mobilized to begin with, and they were young people. So they were really galvanized to stop the spread of slavery. And so one of these prominent 48er was called Henry Borenstein, and he was the editor of this German language, newspaper called Anzeiger Des Westens and another famous 48er it was called Carl Schurz, who became the US Senator from Missouri.

Heidi Matthis (12m 50s):
But some mid century Germans were focused on individual rights, even more were Free Soilers. And so they were against slavery for personal reasons. They were against slavery primarily because they wanted Kansas and Nebraska to be open to individual farmers like themselves and not to be open to the large slavery plantations and the 1854 Kansas Nebraska act, which had opened up Kansas and Nebraska really kind of freak them out. And then also the 1857 Dred Scott Case, that where they just took the rights away of this black man, really galvanized St. Louis Germans. They arrived in the early 1850s.

Heidi Matthis (13m 31s):
And by the late 1850s, they were really mobilized by this newspaper who was run by this very liberal man, Henry Bornstein, that newspaper really helped to galvanize them to be very, very pro-Union by the time the Civil War was about to start.

Diana (13m 47s):
Well, I think they would’ve been talking when they were gathering in saloons or wherever, you know, the churches. This would have been the talk of the time they settled together. You know, they were not spread out all over. They were in German communities there within St. Louis, I believe. And so you can see how this would spread throughout the community, and those who are really vocal, like those people publishing the newspapers would like you’re saying galvanize the entire German population that were living there at the time. So really interesting to think about how these people kind of coalesced into a faction that made a big difference in the Civil War in Missouri.

Nicole (14m 28s):
Can we talk a little bit about some of the differences between the German immigrants and the Americans. But I wondered if there were additional cultural factors that also caused a rift between them.

Heidi Matthis (14m 40s):
Absolutely. So together with the fact that they were anti-slavery and spoke a different language, there was this problem over alcohol between the Germans and the native born Americans. The Germans couldn’t have known about the temperance movement, but the temperance movement was one of the longest lasting in American history. It went all the way from the early 1800s, all the way up to prohibition. And it started because there was a lot of, there was kind of a gin craze in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And husbands would drink all of their wages at all male saloons, and this would wreak havoc on family life. And so women began to really organize.

Heidi Matthis (15m 21s):
And so this was the beginning of the, of the women’s rights movements as well. And then also the abolitionists movement also became tied in with the temperance movement. It was a good thing to try to curb excess drinking in the United States, but the Germans had were coming in with a culture where they wanted to spend their Sundays with their families, having picnics and get-togethers and in beer gardens, and they would drink beer, but it was a different way of drinking. It was a family affair. And so it wasn’t the same situation as, as native born Americans thought of alcohol as being something where you sneak off to a saloon and drink with your buddies.

Heidi Matthis (16m 6s):
And so the Germans didn’t understand this temperance movement, and it was sort of used to kind of beat them up a little bit figuratively. You know, they had passed a lot of Sunday laws as a result of the temperance movement to curb drinking on Sundays and the Germans didn’t like this and sort of rebelled against it.

Nicole (16m 27s):
That is a really interesting cultural difference that I didn’t think of. But of course that would probably cause quite a bit of problems, especially after those Sunday laws were passed.

Heidi Matthis (16m 38s):
Yeah, absolutely. And it was just a way of people misunderstanding each other. Both people had good intentions, but it just caused a cultural rift.

Nicole (16m 48s):
Absolutely. So what happened after the Civil War? Did the St. Louis Germans stay pro-civil rights?

Heidi Matthis (16m 55s):
I wish I could say that they did, but I have read elsewhere that immigrant German populations just tended to kind of just reflect the societies around them and not really have that different political views than their neighbors. And so this period when the Germans did have a really different political view from those around them was unique. And as the Civil War came to an end and the Germans felt like, well, we’re getting our land riots and now black people are free, we can just sort of forget about it. And they did, and their goals kind of diverge from African-Americans at this time. And so they ended up just thinking pretty much about themselves.

Heidi Matthis (17m 37s):
And so they were really no more or less pro-civil rights than the rest of native born Americans were. So that’s, that was kind of disappointing. Yeah.

Nicole (17m 49s):
I think it’s Interesting, you know, when we think about the anti-slavery movement that a little bit of presentism sneaks in and our interpretation of how abolitionists maybe felt, and I think it was probably less about civil rights for them than it was about other factors being like politics and equality, anti slave states versus the slave states. And like we mentioned earlier, the fact that the farmers didn’t want to have to compete with the plantations and that kind of thing. So, you know, I think it was a lot about what’s best for me, and that ended up being the anti-slavery position.

Heidi Matthis (18m 29s):
Absolutely. I’d found that just fascinating as well. And it just, it is a good lesson to go back and think about this time and how our country was formed. I mean, that’s one of the reasons I love genealogy is it gives me a chance to walk in these people’s shoes and think about American history from that point of view. And I think it really has helped me become more aware of what actually happened and even how my family behaved in these different situations.

Diana (18m 59s):
This brings to mind something really interesting. We don’t very often research our ancestors politics, but I have come across some voter registration lists from the 1800s where they listed their political party. And I had never really thought to research that party and what their views were and think about my ancestor in terms of what they might’ve believed about the politics and the country at the time. So that’s another fascinating thing to think of putting our ancestors lives in the context of the world, around them, you know, not always can we find their political views, but there are some things out there that maybe could help us understand that. So I’m just curious, this culture clash, did this continue, did they assimilate?

Diana (19m 43s):
It sounds like they started to assimilate, but you know, maybe some things kind of continued.

Heidi Matthis (19m 48s):
Absolutely. There was one thing that was kind of made me laugh a little bit. So we’ll be talking in the next podcast about this big flare up during the Civil War called the Camp Jackson affair. That was basically a clash between St. Louis Germans and pro-Confederate St. Louis people. So the Germans kind of ended up prevailing in this situation. And so every year on a Sunday, they would commemorate May 10th when this event happened and they would march through St. Louis. And you can understand that it was kind of sticking their finger in the eye of their Confederate neighbors. And there was a conservative newspaper called the Missouri Republican at the time.

Heidi Matthis (20m 29s):
And they remarked, “The ill-advised unfortunate. And we had almost said criminal collision at Camp Jackson”. So, you know, the Germans were kind of lording it over them a little bit, getting back at them, I guess, in some way, but later when World War One and Prohibition came along the Germans were the ones that were under pressure, and this was the peak of anti-German fears, right around World War One and Prohibition, and they quickly anglicized their names and they ended their German language schools and newspapers, and unlike many other people in the United States, immigrant groups, they could just disappear into a vast pool of white Americans by just ceasing to be German.

Heidi Matthis (21m 15s):
I think my own grandpa grew up. He was the one who was born in St. Louis and in is the descendant of Burkhard Schlag. I think my own grandpa grew up with very little sense of German culture. And I’m like we were saying before, I think it’s just too bad that we have trouble with differences and can appreciate and enjoy each other’s differences. And we’re so prone to tribalism because I kind of have wished that, that I could have a little bit more experience of German culture, but really well, my dad is almost entirely 19th century German immigrants, and yet we have almost no German cultural experience in our family.

Diana (21m 52s):
I liked what you said, how they would just disappear into the vast pool of white Americans by just ceasing to be German. And I just had to comment that that was in such contrast to the African-Americans, who could not disappear just because of the color of their skin. And I think we see that assimilation of our European ancestors, that after a generation or two, they anglicize their names, they learned the language, the children learn the language, and then they just became American. So it’s interesting to look at our family history and think about their different situations and think about when that assimilation occurred.

Diana (22m 33s):
I know I’ve been researching my Isenhour ancestor, who was also a German immigrant, but they immigrated in the early 1700s and they were completely anglicized the 1850 had done the name change, children all were going out to Texas and Arkansas and Louisiana, and didn’t seem to bring any of their German culture with them either. So, yeah, I think it happens after a few generations regardless of when they came to the country.

Heidi Matthis (23m 1s):
Yeah. I love that. I think it’s just so important too, to think about like this, this very arbitrary thing, like your skin color, can be used to raise one group above another for no good reason and how, you know, my family for sure was the benefit of that. I mean, my family arrived almost entirely in the mid 1800s, and yet there were African-American people who had been here for so much longer, and yet my ancestors were allowed to feel more American, but after a very short period of time and, and that does really make you think.

Diana (23m 37s):
Yeah, it does. I also wanted to comment on something else that the Germans up until World War I had these German language schools and newspapers. And I’m just thinking about all of the records that could be searched for them, if you only knew how to read German or get into those records. So have you done some, any research into some of those German sources for your family?

Heidi Matthis (24m 4s):
Absolutely. Well, that one newspaper that I mentioned,, Anzeiger Des Westens, I was able to find Burkhard’s funeral announcement in German, and it was tricky to do the technology for reading the German characters, the German characters that they used at that time was called Fraktur. And it’s not as good as reading the regular newspaper type, but it still does work. And I was, by just using the Newspapers.com, able to find some articles for my family in German. And there are some fantastic websites for translating. One thing you can do, if you have found an article about your ancestors and you have it there, in Fraktur is you can download a Fraktur type or Google docs has a Fraktur in their fonts.

Heidi Matthis (24m 56s):
And you can just try to type what you’re seeing into your own Google doc. And then you can just change the font to a more readable one. And then you can just transfer that into Google translate and you can find out what they were writing about because it’s well worth looking for those German language newspapers, because very often our German ancestors left a lot more information in German than they did in English. So I’m glad you brought that up.

Diana (25m 27s):
Yeah, that’s what I was wondering if that is really a key to finding them and to learning about them. It’s looking in those German language sources. So I’m glad to have had some experience. I am just excited that you are writing a series for us on family law could about how to research your German ancestors. So all of our listeners with German ancestors can look forward to learning more learning how to dive into some research that might be a little bit intimidating and difficult to think about.

Heidi Matthis (25m 58s):
Yes, absolutely. I I’ve been having so much fun writing that series and researching your German ancestors is the same in many ways as any other group, but there are some intimidating factors that can kind of block people. And yet today there are so many amazing tools for getting their online records and tricks for being able to get them transcribed and translated. So nobody who has a German ancestor needs to fear they can dive right in.

Diana (26m 29s):
Oh, that’s great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Heidi, we are looking forward to the next podcast where we’ll talk more about these mid 19th century Germans and the Civil War. Thank you again, Heidi, for coming on the podcast and sharing your knowledge of this time with us.

Heidi Matthis (26m 48s):
Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you.

Nicole (26m 51s):
All right, everyone. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye

Diana (26m 56s):
bye-bye

Heidi Matthis (26m 56s):
bye-bye

Nicole (26m 57s):
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